John Keats’ OdesA Brief Summary

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Life and Works

• Born in a well-off but humble family, Keats lost his father at an early age, while tuberculosis caused his mother and brother's death before eventually killing him at only 25.

• He left school at 16 and began his apprenticeship as an apothecary-surgeon. Though he was appointed one in 1816, he soon left his career in order to devote himself entirely to poetry. He was soon to enter the literary circle that gathered around the radical critic end editor Leigh Hunt and his magazine The Examiner.

• After having set himself on a walking tour in the Scottish Highlands during the year 1818, he suffered from a fast health deterioration due to TB. Moreover, his situation was made all the more delicate by his brother Tom's death from the same illness and by the impossibility to fulfil his love for Fanny Brawne (to whom he wrote some beautiful and highly appreciated letters).

• When the symptoms of consumption became overt, he moved to Rome, where he eventually met his death and was buried.

• Earlier works:Sleep and PoetryOn First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer

• Poetic Narratives:EndymionLamiaThe Eve of St. AgnesHyperionThe fall of Hyperion

• The six major odes:Ode on IndolenceOde to PsycheOde to a NightingaleOde on a Grecian UrnOde on MelancholyTo Autumn

• Ballads:La Belle Dame Sans Merci

• Sonnets:On the SonnetBright Star, would I were stedfast as thou art

Life (London, 1795 – Rome, 1821)

Major Works

• The story of “Indolence” is extraordinarily simple—a young man spends a drowsy summer morning lazing about, until he is startled by a vision of Love, Ambition, and Poesy proceeding by him. He feels stirrings of desire to follow the figures, but decides in the end that the temptations of his indolent morning outweigh the temptations of love, ambition, and poetry• Chronologically, the “Ode on Indolence” was probably the second ode. It was composed in the spring of 1819, after “Ode on Melancholy” and a few months before “To Autumn.” However, when the odes are grouped together as a sequence, “Indolence” is often placed first in the group—an arrangement that makes sense, considering that “Indolence” raises the glimmerings of themes explored more fully in the other five poems.

Ode on Indolence

• Ode to Psyche describes Keats' fictional encounter with Psyche and her lover, Cupid/Eros, during a forest walk. Psyche, having been one of the last goddesses to join the Greek Pantheon, does not have a temple. Keats promises to build her one in his mind. • With its loose, rhapsodic formal structure and its extremely lush sensual imagery, the Ode to Psyche finds the speaker turning from the delights of numbness (in Ode on Indolence) to the delights of the creative imagination—even if that imagination is not yet projected outward into art.

Ode to Psyche

• In Ode to a Nightingale, Keats describes his dismay at not being able to live in the ideal world of the nightingale. The nightingale's song, which has been heard by people across millennia, is ageless and perfect; Keats concludes that the bird, unlike the human race, "wast not born for death.“• With Ode to a Nightingale, Keats’ speaker begins his fullest and deepest exploration of the themes of creative expression and the mortality of human life. In this ode, the transience of life and the tragedy of old age is set against the eternal renewal of the nightingale’s fluid music. The speaker reprises the “drowsy numbness” he experienced in Ode on Indolence, but where in “Indolence” that numbness was a sign of disconnection from experience, in “Nightingale” it is a sign of too full a connection.

Ode to a Nightingale

• Ode on a Grecian Urn is a meditation on the perfect, timeless ideal versus the imperfect, lived reality. Keats addresses the urn directly and wonders aloud what real scenes the illustrations on it describe.• If the Ode to a Nightingale portrays Keats’ speaker’s engagement with the fluid expressiveness of music, the Ode on a Grecian Urn portrays his attempt to engage with the static immobility of sculpture. The Grecian urn, passed down through countless centuries to the time of the speaker’s viewing, exists outside of time in the human sense—it does not age, it does not die, and indeed it is alien to all such concepts. In the speaker’s meditation, this creates an intriguing paradox for the human figures carved into the side of the urn: They are free from time, but they are simultaneously frozen in time. They do not have to confront aging and death, but neither can they have experience.

Ode on a Grecian Urn

• The “Ode on Melancholy” is different from the other odes primarily because of its style.The only ode not to be written in the first person, “Melancholy” finds the speaker admonishing or advising sufferers of melancholy in the imperative mode; presumably his advice is the result of his own hard-won experience. In many ways, “Melancholy” seeks to synthesize the language of all the previous odes—the Greek mythology of “Indolence” and “Urn,” the beautiful descriptions of nature in “Psyche” and “Nightingale,” the passion of “Nightingale,” and the philosophy of “Urn,” all find expression in its three stanzas—but “Melancholy” is more than simply an amalgam of the previous poems. In it, the speaker at last explores the nature of transience and the connection of pleasure and pain in a way that lets him move beyond the insufficient aesthetic understanding of “Urn” and achieve the deeper understanding of “To Autumn.”

• For the first time in the odes, the speaker in “Melancholy” urges action rather than passive contemplation. Rejecting both the eagerly embraced drowsiness of “Indolence” and the rapturous “drowsy numbness” of “Nightingale,” the speaker declares that he must remain alert and open to “wakeful anguish,” and rather than flee from sadness, he will instead glut it on the pleasures of beauty. Instead of numbing himself to the knowledge that his mistress will grow old and die, he uses that knowledge to feel her beauty even more acutely.

• In the third stanza, the speaker offers his most convincing synthesis of melancholy and joy. It is precisely the fact that joy will come to an end that makes the experience of joy such a ravishing one; the fact that beauty dies makes the experience of beauty sharper and more thrilling. 

Ode on Melancholy

• For the text and a reading of the ode, go the Poetry Foundation website:https://www.poetryfoundation.org/resources/learning/core-poems/detail/44484

• For an in-depth analysis (not mandatory), watch the following video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCWDEt9xfqY

• SummaryAutumn joins with the maturing sun to load the vines with grapes, to ripen apples and other fruit, "swell the gourd," fill up the hazel shells, and set budding more and more flowers. Autumn may be seen sitting on a threshing floor, sound asleep in a grain field filled with poppies, carrying a load of grain across a brook, or watching the juice oozing from a cider press. The sounds of autumn are the wailing of gnats, the bleating of lambs, the singing of hedge crickets, the whistling of robins, and the twittering of swallows.

To Autumn

• In both its form and descriptive surface, To Autumn is one of the simplest of Keats’s odes. The extraordinary achievement of this poem lies in its ability to suggest, explore, and develop a rich abundance of themes without ever ruffling its calm, gentle, and lovely description of autumn. Where Ode on Melancholy presents itself as a strenuous heroic quest, To Autumn is concerned with the much quieter activity of daily observation and appreciation. In this quietude, the gathered themes of the preceding odes find their fullest and most beautiful expression.

• To Autumn takes up where the other odes leave off. Like the others, it shows Keats’s speaker paying homage to a particular goddess—in this case, the deified season of Autumn. The selection of this season implicitly takes up the other odes’ themes of temporality, mortality, and change: Autumn in Keats’s ode is a time of warmth and plenty, but it is perched on the brink of winter’s desolation, as the bees enjoy “later flowers,” the harvest is gathered from the fields, the lambs of spring are now “full grown,” and, in the final line of the poem, the swallows gather for their winter migration. The understated sense of inevitable loss in that final line makes it one of the most moving moments in all of poetry; it can be read as a simple, uncomplaining summation of the entire human condition.

• Despite the coming chill of winter, the late warmth of autumn provides Keats’s speaker with ample beauty to celebrate: the cottage and its surroundings in the first stanza, the agrarian haunts of the goddess in the second, and the locales of natural creatures in the third. Keats’s speaker is able to experience these beauties in a sincere and meaningful way because of the lessons he has learned in the previous odes: He is no longer indolent, no longer committed to the isolated imagination (as in “Psyche”), no longer attempting to escape the pain of the world through ecstatic rapture (as in “Nightingale”), no longer frustrated by the attempt to eternalize mortal beauty or subject eternal beauty to time (as in “Urn”), and no longer able to frame the connection of pleasure and the sorrow of loss only as an imaginary heroic quest (as in “Melancholy”).

To Autumn